Kazaa tech chief joins BBC future technology team

Heads up next generation iPlayer

The shakeup of the BBC's iPlayer team we revealed last week was officially announced yesterday with the appointment of Kazaa CTO Anthony Rose as head of digital media technology.

Rose will be in charge of the next generation iPlayer group, which will include ex-Microsoft man Jon Billings. Rose in turn will report to the Corporation's digital media controller Erik Huggers, who joined the Beeb from Microsoft in May.

Rose spent six years at Kazaa, which took the lead in file sharing after Napster's effective demise. Kazaa eventually reached a legal settlement with the record industry, but had already been superceded by BitTorrent.

The P2P distribution system used by iPlayer (as well as Sky Anytime and 4OD) is provided by Kontiki, a Verisign-owned company.

The BBC's reorganisation has created six new groups responsible for future technological developments across the organisation. One Reg source, who asked to remain anonymous, was brought in as a consultant on the troubled iPlayer project early this year, and described it as having been run "worse than boo.com", if you can believe it. ®